It does seem like they are reinventing the wheel - digital magazine Monkey from Dennis Publishing has been around for years now.

The companies plan to sell their versions of their publications to consumers through an iTunes type of online store.

This clearly offers an amazing opportunity to start halting the decline in magazine sales. It also offers the vast network of media suppliers - such as freelance journalists and photographers and photo agencies some hope of new money in a fiercely tough market.

Although this computer doesn't publicly exist, the companies are pumping millions of dollars into building software that they hope will allow them to cash in from online spending. Although it will initially be about magazines, the final, as yet unnamed, product will work for online websites and books too.

So why are these famously online skeptical companies now scrambling, a decade late, to jump headfirst into the market?

After years of bumper profits, its crunch time in the publishing houses. Instead of launching new titles, which is what they all did earlier this decade, the business is all about closures.

One MD of a UK magazine publisher told me recently that he felt that there were far too many magazines out there, and that a reduction of 40% in terms of numbers of titles was a realistic expectation in the coming years.

Now the tide has turned, the magazine players are determined to make big money from the shift in consumer spending, which is clearly away from paper and towards screens.

Content providers are also putting plans in place. A group of influential independent photo agencies in the USA are already working together to prepare for what they see as a great chance to expand their marketplace.

Many media companies acted like this ten years ago and invested lots of time, money and energy into publishing their content online. The huge mistake was that they gave their content away, believing that a buoyant advertising market would pay all the bills and then some.

However, with no bar to entry, every Tom Dick and Harriet could build and run a website. Therefore, advertisers could pick and choose from millions of different places to spend their money, rather than a tight group of newspapers and magazines. The nature of the internet allowed them to only pay by results - click throughs - rather than by space rates.

Consumers were taught to expect amazing content for free. And now the publishers are desperate to claw some revenue back.

We need to hope that the iTablet - or whatever Apple call it - is indeed a massive success, and that huge magazine brands like Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Wired etc are a big enough draw to coax online buyers to part with their cash.

By working together, these huge corporations are trying to ensure that the market doesn't pull itself apart by wasting millions on all doing similar things at once. Now that the Media sector is in crisis, another big mistake doesn't bear thinking about.

Comments

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Hmm, I'm not convinced that a new device is required for this, at least technologically speaking. Mobile phone handsets are big enough to read articles on but small enough (just about) to fit in the pocket. Who's going to carry a tablet PC/Mac around with them all day?

Magazines can already be published as a website, accessible via a subscriber login, so there's no need for a new device or publishing format. The debate about whether a new device can somehow "save" the magazine industry might be informed by looking to the Kindle. Is it saving book and newspaper publishing? (In fact, does the Kindle already offer magazine downloads?)

I'd agree. iTunes is a very different beast than anything else that was available at the time. I feel that unless pretty much every major publisher moves to charging at once, the temptation for some of them to remain free to view will be too great.